Fiscal Conservatism Quotes
of requests from conservative Congressmen who want pork projects added to appropriation bills In one of the great ironies of Washington, Dyer was named “Porker of the Year” yet there was no pork placed in appropriations bills that were not specifically requested (insisted upon) by a member of Congress.
This is the kind of advice that Presidents have given the Congress for years. What makes this quotation noteworthy is the person who made the statement, President George W. Bush. It was made in the 7th year of his Presidency which had in those 7 years, at his urging, gone from a balanced budget and a national surplus projected, to the largest deficit of any nation in history and a projected deficit that even dwarfed that. So the irony of the quotation was that the politician who produced the largest economic burden on future generations was lecturing other politicians on the evils of doing exactly what he himself had been doing. Bush, if nothing else, was one of the most audacious politicians in this respect, though his most severe detractors claim that he did not have the intellectual perspective to even understand the hypocrisy of his quotation,
Jefferson was opposed to a standing army or a buildup of revenue even in case of war. He thought that a national surplus might tempt an administration to engage in war. This was one of the biggest differences between the Jeffersonians or Republican Democrats as they called themselves and the Federalists led by George Washington and John Adams. Washington was a strong advocate of military preparedness, while Jefferson believed that a nation which had a strong army and war chest would be too easily tempted to use it. That debate has raged in America since. However, at the beginning of the second world war, the then conservative party, the Republicans, had adopted the Jeffersonian view and it was FDR and the Democrats arguing for armament and preparedness. The United States was terribly unprepared for war, but mobilized rapidly and won the day. Since then both parties have supported military preparedness and the political argument has been over the degree, but there are few Jeffersonians left when it comes to military preparedness.
